Tutorial on managing accounts and user access

This tutorial will walk you through adding and managing accounts and users.

Before you start

Before you start this tutorial, some things to understand:

• Pro or Enterprise edition is required
• This tutorial is for managing users who are on our newer user model (true of almost all New Relic users)
• This tutorial will be easier if you first have a basic understanding of:
  • Organization and account concepts
  • User management concepts
• This tutorial won't show you all user management functionality. For more complete docs, review the user management docs.
• This tutorial presents one recommended workflow but there are many ways to do these steps and no particular order of steps is necessary.
• For an example spreadsheet showing how one might plan out your users' roles and account access, see the Group access planning spreadsheet.

Overview

This tutorial will walk you through:

1. Organization creation
2. How to add accounts
3. How to set up an authentication domain
4. How to set up custom roles
5. How to manage group access
6. How to add users

Step 1: Organization creation

If you're reading this, you likely already have a New Relic organization. When you sign up for New Relic, your New Relic organization is created. The organization structure represents a New Relic customer: it's what contains everything relevant to a customer's use of New Relic, such as accounts, users, and data.

When a New Relic organization is created, it contains a single account. If you're on our Free or Standard edition, your organization can have only a single account, while Pro and Enterprise editions allow you to add accounts. Each account has its own account ID, and that ID is used for some account-specific tasks, like making API calls.

When your organization is created, it has two default user groups with access to roles and accounts already assigned. When you add users via the UI, there are two default groups that you can assign your users to:

• Admin: can use and configure observability features for that initial account, and the ability to view and configure administration settings (like adding accounts or managing users).
• User: can use and configure observability features (but lacks access to the higher level administration settings).

You can see the access assigned for these default groups by going to the Access management UI:

You can see how the User group has the All product admin role and access to that initially created account. And you can see how the Admin group has some administration settings assigned. The Default next to those group names refers to them being in the original, default authentication domain (we'll talk more about that later).

Pro and Enterprise edition organizations are able to add custom groups, or bring in groups from their identity provider.

Step 2: Add accounts

Before adding your users in New Relic, you might want to get some data reporting and set up additional accounts. This isn't required at this point: you can always set up accounts and get data reporting later, and adjust your users' access after that.

For guidance on why an organization should create more accounts, see Organization structure.

If you did want to create accounts at this point, see Add accounts.

Step 3: Set up authentication domains

When your organization is first created, the groups and users are located in a default authentication domain, named "Default." An "authentication domain" is a grouping of New Relic users governed by the same user management settings, like how they're provisioned (added and updated), how they're authenticated (logged in), session settings, and how user upgrades are handled.

The default authentication settings are:

• Users are manually added and managed via the New Relic UI
• Users manually log in to New Relic using their email and password

Having that one authentication domain might be fine for many organizations, but some organizations want one or both of the following:

• Single sign-on (SAML SSO)
• Managing their users from their identity provider via SCIM provisioning

If you need single sign-on or SCIM provisioning, you'll have to create an additional authentication domain. Note that groups and users are contained within authentication domains, and you can't easily change an authentication domain's provisioning setting or authentication setting once the domain is created: this means you should spend some time thinking about what your authentication domain settings should be before you add users to them.

If you're okay with the default authentication domain (managing your users from New Relic, with your users logging in with their email and password), you can skip to Step #4. If you want to use SAML SSO or SCIM provisioning, see these options:

Step 4. Create custom roles (optional)

We have default-available roles (standard roles), so creating custom roles is optional. If you don't have a need for custom roles, you can skip this step.

Some tips to help you understand what roles are:

• Users are assigned to groups (for example, the default Admin and User groups), and those groups are assigned various roles and accounts. Put another way: it's not the group that gives users access to New Relic permissions: it's the roles.
• A role contains various permissions. For example: the permission to create and modify alert conditions, or the permission to delete data ingest license keys (for more information, see Permissions).
• Unlike groups and users, roles are not contained in an authentication domain: they're available across the entire organization.
• We have several default-available roles, which we call standard roles. Some of these are assigned to the Admin and User groups that are available by default. If your organization is Pro or Enterprise edition, you can create your own custom roles.

For an example spreadsheet showing how one might plan out user access, see this Group access planning spreadsheet.

To view existing roles: from the user menu, click Administration, then click Access management, and then click Roles.

To create a custom role, click Add new custom role. Review the list of available permissions and decide which ones your custom role needs.

Here's a short NerdByte video showing how to create a custom role (4:07 minutes):

For more information about how roles and permissions work, see Capabilities.

Step 5. Create groups and assign access

Groups are used to group your users and manage what your users are able to do in New Relic. You assign groups one or more roles on one or more accounts.

For an example spreadsheet showing how one might plan out your users' access, see the Group access planning spreadsheet.

To view existing groups: from the user menu, click Administration, and then click Access management. Under the Groups tab, you'll see the existing groups and what access they've been assigned. (For more on this, go back to Step #1).

If your organization has multiple accounts, or if you're using SCIM provisioning, you'll need to add access to existing groups or to new groups.

You can manage groups via either the UI or via API:

Manage group access via the UI

Before adding access to groups, ensure you have a good understanding of the user management concepts and have a good plan for the access you want to add. It may help to map out the groups, roles, and accounts you want users to have access to in a spreadsheet beforehand: here's an example spreadsheet for planning access.

To add access to groups in the UI:

1. From the Access management UI, click Groups.
2. You can create a new group or edit an existing one:

• To create a new group, click Create new group and follow the instructions.
• To edit an existing one, click the icon for the group you want to edit. Click View group details and edit the group's access.

When you're done, if users are already assigned to the group you created or edited, those users will have the new access within a few minutes (although for EU region organizations, this can take up to twenty minutes or so). If your users are not yet in that group (which would be true if you just created a new group), the next step will show you how to add users.

Some tips for using this UI:

• Want to understand the roles and administration settings better? See Roles.
• When selecting from amongst our standard roles, it's important to understand the difference between All product admin and Standard user. All product admin is a more popular choice because it gives the ability to configure platform features. If you wanted to have your users be able to use platform features but not configure the settings for those features, you'd choose Standard user.

Manage group access via API

For how to manage group access via the API, see NerdGraph user management.

Step 6. Add users

Due to how we bill per calendar month, there are reasons you may want to wait until the beginning of a month to add users. For more on that, see User billing.

If you're using SCIM provisioning, you should be done at this point because your groups and users are imported from your identity provider. You can move to the verification step.

Otherwise, you'll need to add users. In the user management UI, you can see your users and the groups they've been assigned to.

Suggested steps for adding users via the UI:

1. To view users and see their groups: from the user menu, click Administration, and click User management.
2. Optional: select your authentication domain using the domain switcher. (Remember that groups reside within the boundaries of an authentication domain).
3. To add a user, click Add user. Complete the prompts in the UI, including choosing the user type and group. Any custom groups you've added are available from the group dropdown. If the custom group you choose has a role and account assigned, once you add the user to that group, that user will have access.

To edit a user's group or other details: click on the user you want to edit and make changes. For tips on bulk editing and other common tasks, see Common user management tasks.

You can also use our NerdGraph API to add and manage users

Step 7. Verify things are working

Ideas for checking that your users are configured correctly:

• Go to the User management UI and Access management UI and see if the groups and grants assignments look correct and make sense.
• Have some of your users see if they can log in and access the accounts they expect to see.

Ideas for next steps:

• Set up more New Relic integrations
• Add more users